


hours afterwards the bruise

by indigostohelit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Cold War, Coming to America Story, Diaspora, Fairy Tale Elements, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 08:49:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14638335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: The Pacific is good. The Atlantic is better; even brackish in the Hudson, even bounded by Jersey on the far side. Coney Island is best of all, when he can roll up his pants to his knees and wade in, carrying his shoes in his hand, the laces trailing against the knobby bones of his wrist, when he can leave the shoes and the shirt on the sand and pick up his feet and go whooping into the waves that swell up against his chest. Lifted by the current, borne up briefly towards the sun, and then pushed back and set down on the new shore. On his own shore.His own country.





	hours afterwards the bruise

**Author's Note:**

> I woke up on a Saturday morning and thought "what I wish the movies had more of, is the Soviet Union," and then, "I know why everyone always writes Jewish!Bucky as Romanian, but what if," and then I sat upright in bed and said aloud, "Oh no."
> 
> I would not advise using any of the words Bucky uses for Jews in real life. The fairy tale referenced is usually titled The Feather of Finist the Falcon.

There was once a country in the thrice-seventh land of the thrice-seventh kingdom -

.

A few lies, for the record:

  * That they made him a murderer, which they did not;
  * that they made him a weapon, which they did not;
  * that they taught him Russian, which they did not.



Spanish, sure. Canto, sure. Arabic, sure, and wasn't  _that_  a bitch, Moroccan and Gulf and Egyptian and Standard, too, for all the good it ever did him. Polish, sure. Serbian, sure. Ukrainian, sure.

Russian he knew.

And Yiddish. Not that they asked him to speak Yiddish. Not that they ever had.

.

Here's one: a girl is on a journey. It doesn't matter why. She's going to find her boyfriend, who she lost - it doesn't matter how. She's wearing her third pair of iron shoes.

She finds him, actually. Or she finds his shirt, which is so soaked with blood it's gone from blue to black. Which no one at the castle - she's at a castle - can wash out, except she sits down with a brush and a bucket and all of a sudden all the blood is gone. And the shirt is sitting in the clear water, like nothing ever happened to it. And she says, I want to see the man whose shirt this is, and they say Fine, and she goes to meet her boyfriend, who looks up and says, Who are you?

.

Okay, but is it good for the Jews?

.

A thing he likes, when he gets to see it: the sea.

The Pacific is good. The Atlantic is better; even brackish in the Hudson, even bounded by Jersey on the far side. Coney Island is best of all, when he can roll up his pants to his knees and wade in, carrying his shoes in his hand, the laces trailing against the knobby bones of his wrist, when he can leave the shoes and the shirt on the sand and pick up his feet and go whooping into the waves that swell up against his chest. Lifted by the current, borne up briefly towards the sun, and then pushed back and set down on the new shore. On his own shore.

His own country.

By the time he's grown they have planes anybody can ride in. Not far, not reliably; the paratroopers are going to France from London in the air, but the rest of the time they keep their feet on the ground like everybody else. Bombers are bombers, fighter pilots fighter pilots; that's different. That's not what he means.

What does he mean?

He means: when he tells his mother, she says, Japan? and when he says No, she goes into the bathroom and shuts the door and doesn't come out for an hour.

Or he means: the traveler's prayer says - in Hebrew, of course, which he doesn't speak, which even seventy-five years later he still doesn't speak -  _May it be your will, Adonai our god and god of our fathers, that you lead us towards peace, guide our footsteps towards peace, make us reach our destination in life, joy, and peace -_

Which is objectively pretty funny. Given the circumstances.

.

Or, okay, here's another. There's a rabbi's daughter, and everyone is talking, because she's nearly eighteen and there's no fit man for her to marry. The butcher is unwed, the tailor - so? Who's the tailor, what does he have to offer, the boy who left study the day after he became a Bar Mitzvah? The rabbi teaches all the boys in the shtetl, he knows them all by name, who among them is a scholar? Who loves Torah? Who is learned enough for the rabbi's only child?

A man comes; a traveler, the brother of the woman who owns the button shop. A scholar, they say. A learned man. Only twenty-four, maybe a little young, but Hashem provides. They marry. They're happy, even.

So soldiers come. So they say, who here is strong and healthy, and under forty. So it goes. So he goes.

But she never does get -  _a letter?_  he says to her later, the year of the Lord 5685, eight years old and already distracted from the story by the sun on the window and the shouts in the street.

She says,  _you think they sent letters for Jews? A report, though. His clothes. Anything._

She marries again.

She thinks of the first man as she does it. Of his body, run through in Mukden, sinking into the water at Port Arthur. Walking around in Kiev; touching a goyisher woman in St. Petersburg. With his beard trimmed, and his head bare, and all the Yid tucked out of his Russian. He might be clever enough, the man who went to war, to make that work for him. A learned man.

A year later, on a Saturday morning, the soldiers come again and shoot her father dead in the synagogue.

 

.

Okay. You want to hear about Captain America? Here's what he knows about Captain America.

Doesn't speak Russian. Barely speaks a word of Yiddish, even the bullcrap Yinglish that the neighborhood boys pull out when the cops are around or their mothers get fussy. Maybe half a sentence's worth of Italian, though why he'd need to know any word beyond _cannoli_ Hashem knows. God certainly knows  _pierogi_ is all either of them can say to the Polacks.

For all he ends up being and doing, as a kid, weirdly gentle. Takes the rat they found, the one that got into the cans over the winter, and puts it in a little box and takes it downstairs to the park. And lets it go. Which is stupid.

Blond, all right, for all the shit the dead shtetl would give him if they knew; blond and blue-eyed and goyishe as the day is long. Hands like a pianist's and face like sunshine and an accent like he's been in Brooklyn since the British left. And he goes to church on goddamn Sundays, too.

Goes to Mr. Kazinsky the Gentile butcher catercorner from the deli, the summer he turns fourteen, and sits there for hours every Thursday. He brings a notebook. The whole building figures it's a drawing thing, and far be it from anybody to stop that boy when he's got an idea in his head. And when he leaves Mr. Kazinsky's the first day of September he finds Joe DeLuca who was kicking the mangy strays that eat out of the trash cans and socks him in the gut so good it takes a whole thirty seconds for the fucker to recover enough to lay him out cold. Which is funny, because the kid has arms like a toothpick, and it had to have been a hell of a lucky hit.

And afterwards Bucky comes over and helps Steve wash the pig blood out of his shoes.

.

She has three gifts. This is the girl looking for her boyfriend again. She has a silver acorn, which a witch gave her, and a gold acorn, which another witch gave her, and a feather, which her boyfriend gave her, which is his.

She trades them all. Three nights. The first goes by, and the guy sleeps through it without seeing her; the second goes by, and he sleeps through that one too. On the third she notices he has some kind of pin in his hair, which is glittering peculiar-like. She pulls it out.

And his head falls off.

Wait. That's from later.

.

The boat is enormous, like a Leviathan. His mother is crying, her fingers tight on his arm. He'll have marks where her fingernails dug in. Under his feet the dock is swaying. He has stepped off the shore for the last time.

No. This is wrong.

The boat is enormous, like a Leviathan. His mother is crying quietly, like an afterthought. Her husband's hand is hot on her shoulder. In her belly something is moving. She has stepped off the shore for the last time.

Not this, either.

This, then. An old story. A cliche.

A girl leaves her mother. The mother says, Where are you, my child? and the girl says nothing, because she is not a child, and because she is hiding.

She goes to another land, which is very strange, and very far away. In this land they say, You must wear our clothes, and she does; they say, You must speak our tongue, and she does; they say, You must change your name. And she is no longer called the girl. And they say, you must eat our food. And she does: six pomegranate seeds.

But this is wrong, too. It's backwards.

Here's what happens: a crack opens in the earth, and the girl who is not a girl falls into it. And he lands in a different country, where the frost spreads over the earth, and the sky is white and silent with the snow. And the country of winter opens her arms and says, My child, welcome home.

.

Bucky murders a lot of people in Italy, which he's good at. The peninsula having been invaded and everything, it's not even that hard. Also he has a bunch of kids to take care of, none of who can find their ass with both hands and most of who are champing at the bit to go out and die for glory, so it's business as usual, really.

None of them Hebes. Charlie Company has one, and Able has a Max Wozniak who Bucky's pretty sure would Jew up if he went over and talked Brooklyn at him a while. But he won't; for one thing, they're halfway through goddamn Italy, where Bucky wouldn't be shouting in Yiddish even before the war without looking over his shoulder, and for another, the kid's patently a queer and doesn't need another strike against him.

He does seriously think about getting the kid behind a tree away from camp sometime, but decides against it. Not that he's ever been frum - but it still seems wrong somehow, fucking and fighting one right after the other. Makes him feel like an animal, something rolling around in its own mess. Hot and dirty and ugly and rootless, no direction and no land beneath him, a seesaw caught between two weights and still unbalanced.

He'd hate it more if he didn't have the Army. Not that he likes the Army, not that he doesn't hate the Army - what kind of sergeant would he be if he didn't, for the love of God. But the Army makes it better; the uniform makes it better, the pointless bullshit saluting and standing and sitting it and doing it all just so makes it better. God save him, the fucking flag makes it better, the cheap piece of cloth with the red and the star -

\- stars -

The red and the stars. And the white. And the blue. They're there, too. That's what's right.

.

They only have Steve over for one seder before Bucky moves out, which isn't a snub. Or isn't meant to be. Steve's had him over for Christmas, and had his mother too, and for Easter, even. For them it's politeness.

The reason it takes Bucky until he's eighteen to ask his mother  _How come we never have Steve over for Passover?_  is because he knows the answer. When he asks he wishes he hadn't. He can see Steve at table - wearing a tie, with his blond blond hair greased back - eating eggs and brisket, and even saying Amen after kaddish, and being - Christ - polite-

Or maybe it happened differently. Maybe he came and was funny and happy and clever and everything any two-cent kike out of Brooklyn could ask to be in love with. Maybe he came ten times for Passover, maybe twenty times. Maybe he never came at all.

But Bucky's pretty sure this is true:

They were walking once through the park. This might've been 1926 or 1927 or 5688. And someone'd tied an old plank of wood on a rope to a tree - the nails were still sticking out of the bottom - and they'd gone to swing on it, laughing, and then when Steve's turn had taken so long Bucky'd thought Brooklyn'd be dead and in the ground before he was done, he'd climbed the tree, which had long low branches and dips and knots in its trunk, and looked down through the leaves.

And seen Steve below, blue-eyed and smiling and calling out to him in his broad vowels, and far beyond him, where the sun was bleeding gold into the sea, a ship pulling into the harbor.

And he'd thought,  _rodina;_ and then tried to think of the Yiddish word, and couldn't.

.

Here's the reason the girl is trying to find her boyfriend. Here's the reason she lost him in the first place. When he came to her window, he came as a falcon, and perched there; but her sisters heard and grew jealous, and they took knives and put them blade-up on her windowsill. And when he flew to her that evening he was cut nearly to ribbons, and fled into the night with his great wings beating like an train engine.

It's a Russian story. It was Russian when his mother told it to him, and her voice cracked around the consonants. They tell it differently in America now, he's seen it; he's not a bird, he's an animal, huge and fanged and furred. She doesn't let him fly away; she cries over his body instead. And she doesn't trade gifts for nights with him, because the witches are gone.

In the old country, too, it's the same.

It seems unfair that this should be so. Unfair that the old country should have changed at all. Unfair that the winter should become summer behind them, and winter again, and that the language should change and the clothing change, and the names of the towns and the cities change. That it should remain, and not remain; that its people should die without its dying. That, after all this, the witches should be gone, and the monsters remain.

.

But he does have sex at war, once. In Wakanda, after he comes out of the ice.

_At war_ , he calls it. Before this war. After the last war. Steve's shield is gone, but the world isn't ending. He doesn't know what to call months like this, with nothing to fight but wind. They're unnatural to him.

He's gotten better. But they had to tell him some things over again: where Ebbets Field was, who lived across from the tailor's shop. The name of the guy who did this to Steve. What his religion was.

Steve's on his way here from somewhere, stopping for a day on the way to somewhere else. He asks him how it feels being a wanted man, because it's funny. And then Steve looks up at him, and kisses him, and he thinks, Oh, okay, like that.

He used to dream about this in Brooklyn. Dreamed about it in Russia, too. But he tries not to think about that - what he did and didn't do in Russia, where he did and didn't carry it. What he would and wouldn't do for his mother, lying in a grave in Brooklyn, lying from the Urals to the Bering Strait half a world away.

This is a country hours from any ship. By design it's this way; and Bucky thinks, for the first time in his life, Baruch hashem, and lets himself be carried up towards the sun.

.

She pulls the pin out of his hair, and he wakes up, and he says her name. That's what happens. That's how it goes.

.

Somewhere around what might be Naples and might be Odessa he sees the sea again. The first time since beachhead.

It's not like New York Harbor; for example, smells better. Also, the color of it, wide and turquoise and glittering, nothing like the flat colorlessness where the East River meets the Hudson, the aching olive-grey before a storm. No lady perched on her island, little and green and framed against the clouds. No Jersey.

He unties his shoes, rolls his pants up to his knees. Takes his boots in his hand. The laces brush against his wrist. It feels like a dream.

Around his ankles, the water is cool, not cold. Mediterranean, or Black. Not Atlantic. To get near the right boats he'd have to walk all the way to Spain.

Three pairs of iron shoes. And no knives at his feet. He could give himself a head start.


End file.
